GNU Octave is a high-level interpreted language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides capabilities for the numerical solution of linear and nonlinear problems, and for performing other numerical experiments. It also provides extensive graphics capabilities for data visualization and manipulation. Octave is normally used through its interactive command line interface, but it can also be used to write non-interactive programs. The Octave language is quite similar to Matlab so that most programs are easily portable.

Reading Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets

There are several ways to read Microsoft Excel files with Octave.

Converting to an open format

The easiest way to use .xls files in Octave would be to convert them to .csv or .ods using Calc (limited to 1024 columns) from Libreoffice or Sheets(limited to 32768 columns) from the the Calligra Suite.

After the conversion is complete you can use the build-in Octave function csvread for .csv files:

octave:1> csvread('myfile.csv');

For .ods files the octave-ioAUR package is necessary which contains the odsread function: